Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
This could all have been avoided if we selected Spider Punk
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
Who was really honestly expecting Hercules 2.0? A perfect storm of a dozen or more individually advantageous design choices that in a smaller subset wouldn't be OP, just good? Who was seriously claiming that the SC champ must absolutely be absurdly OP no matter what, like the design team had no choice in the matter or was pushing "Vote Cosmic, no matter who it is", for such a dumb reason? That's just an easy straw man to throw out to invalidate any criticism or expressed disappointment, legitimate and rational or not.
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
This could all have been avoided if we selected Spider Punk
This is the correct answer.
I’m just saying you have a bunch of live streams coming up and nobody can stop you from making them all Spider-Punk themed.
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
You can give the PR response all you want Jaxon, but the reality is: it would be absurd to expect Hercules 2.0. However, you know who’s a Summoner’s Choice champ that stands on his two feet? Quicksilver. I think the fact that Gladiator isn’t a Quicksilver 2.0 is the problem.
You're missing the point entirely. The point was not that future summoner's choice champs won't be Hercules powerful, the point was that future summoner's choice champs have no specific targeted power level separate from champs in general. Whenever Kabam makes a champ, they make a champ based on a number of different criteria that affect their performance. Some are designed to be good defenders, some are designed to be good attackers, some are designed for long form content some for shorter burst fights, some are designed to be some kind of balance between different options. The *ratio* of how much a champion is this or that is what the designers choose when designing a champ.
The *how much* a champion ends up being is not generally an explicit target. Designers don't decide "this champ will be awesome" and "this champ will be subpar." Those things happen as a natural consequence of the design process: nothing hits the bullseye to begin with, and the degree to which players can leverage the abilities of a champion are a separate difficult to predict variable.
When you design a champ you only ultimately know what you can do with it. When other players test it, you know what they can do with it, after a couple days or weeks of thought. But you never know how a champ will work when released to a million other players. There are lots of champs that start off looking meh and then end up looking great after enough time elapses. And there are champs that look awesome but then after a while the players realize that what it does is not as important as they thought it would be. Into this fog of war, champion designs are released, and no one who claims to know right from the start where a champ will land is going to be right even most of the time.
Whether a champ is a summoner's choice or not has no bearing on any of this, and never will. There's never going to be another Herc, because there was never supposed to even be one of him. But that has nothing to do with him being summoner's choice. And before someone says it, I'll just say that anyone who thinks that players have every right to expect summoner's choice champs to be automatically much better than most other champs specifically because they are summoner's choice champs is just wrong, always will be wrong, and has to get over it because that's never going to change.
If you don't like Gladiator or believe he's underperforming, that's fine. That's for players to decide for every champ. But tying this to the summoner's choice process like that should matter is having the wrong expectations about what the summoner's choice process even is.
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
I find this response out of place. Although not the most eloquently written, OP’s claim wasn't that “If a champ isn’t as good as Hercules then it’s bad”. They claimed that Gladiator, as a summoner’s choice champion, should be reasonably expected to be a solid addition but fear of Hercules 2.0 caused you to be far too conservative in his design. No matter what you consider his peers: Be it 2023 champs or Summoners Choice Champs, Gladiator is probably the worst of the bunch which is disappointing to say the least.
Lumping that claim in with the “Herc or nothing” response misses the point altogether in my opinion and makes for a frail binary. It’s especially self defeating when Quicksilver, who is no Hercules, exists and has been well received (if not loved) by the community showcasing that a well put together kit paired with some solid relevance is all we ask for in the community champ. It may also be telling that the defense isn't that he is a solid champion/addition but rather spinning it back on the expectations of the community which may reveal Kabam’s own impressions of where Gladiator has landed
If I can’t expect a Summoner’s Choice champ to be solidly in the top 25% of champs in the game I’m a lot less enthused about voting for the next one.
I don’t need broken OP but I thought being a Summoners Choice champ had some additional clout. If it’s just us picking who comes first in group of 8 and they may be a dud and stay a dud that’s dissapointing.
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
This could all have been avoided if we selected Spider Punk
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
I find this response out of place. Although not the most eloquently written, OP’s claim wasn't that “If a champ isn’t as good as Hercules then it’s bad”. They claimed that Gladiator, as a summoner’s choice champion, should be reasonably expected to be a solid addition but fear of Hercules 2.0 caused you to be far too conservative in his design. No matter what you consider his peers: Be it 2023 champs or Summoners Choice Champs, Gladiator is probably the worst of the bunch which is disappointing to say the least.
Lumping that claim in with the “Herc or nothing” response misses the point altogether in my opinion and makes for a frail binary. It’s especially self defeating when Quicksilver, who is no Hercules, exists and has been well received (if not loved) by the community showcasing that a well put together kit paired with some solid relevance is all we ask for in the community champ. It may also be telling that the defense isn't that he is a solid champion/addition but rather spinning it back on the expectations of the community which may reveal Kabam’s own impressions of where Gladiator has landed
This was never a defence of Gladiator. I started my response by providing the context in which I was speaking: anecdotally, about the observations I made during the voting.
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
This could all have been avoided if we selected Spider Punk
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
I find this response out of place. Although not the most eloquently written, OP’s claim wasn't that “If a champ isn’t as good as Hercules then it’s bad”. They claimed that Gladiator, as a summoner’s choice champion, should be reasonably expected to be a solid addition but fear of Hercules 2.0 caused you to be far too conservative in his design. No matter what you consider his peers: Be it 2023 champs or Summoners Choice Champs, Gladiator is probably the worst of the bunch which is disappointing to say the least.
Lumping that claim in with the “Herc or nothing” response misses the point altogether in my opinion and makes for a frail binary. It’s especially self defeating when Quicksilver, who is no Hercules, exists and has been well received (if not loved) by the community showcasing that a well put together kit paired with some solid relevance is all we ask for in the community champ. It may also be telling that the defense isn't that he is a solid champion/addition but rather spinning it back on the expectations of the community which may reveal Kabam’s own impressions of where Gladiator has landed
This was never a defence of Gladiator. I started my response by providing the context in which I was speaking: anecdotally, about the observations I made during the voting.
Hence why I find it out of place on this thread. I think we’re in agreement here that this point was tangential no?
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
This could all have been avoided if we selected Spider Punk
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
I find this response out of place. Although not the most eloquently written, OP’s claim wasn't that “If a champ isn’t as good as Hercules then it’s bad”. They claimed that Gladiator, as a summoner’s choice champion, should be reasonably expected to be a solid addition but fear of Hercules 2.0 caused you to be far too conservative in his design. No matter what you consider his peers: Be it 2023 champs or Summoners Choice Champs, Gladiator is probably the worst of the bunch which is disappointing to say the least.
Lumping that claim in with the “Herc or nothing” response misses the point altogether in my opinion and makes for a frail binary. It’s especially self defeating when Quicksilver, who is no Hercules, exists and has been well received (if not loved) by the community showcasing that a well put together kit paired with some solid relevance is all we ask for in the community champ. It may also be telling that the defense isn't that he is a solid champion/addition but rather spinning it back on the expectations of the community which may reveal Kabam’s own impressions of where Gladiator has landed
This was never a defence of Gladiator. I started my response by providing the context in which I was speaking: anecdotally, about the observations I made during the voting.
Hence why I find it out of place on this thread. I think we’re in agreement here that this point was tangential no?
It was tangential... which is why I prefaced it. Not sure why you think that would mean it doesn't belong.
Whenever Kabam makes a champ, they make a champ based on a number of different criteria that affect their performance. Some are designed to be good defenders, some are designed to be good attackers, some are designed for long form content some for shorter burst fights, some are designed to be some kind of balance between different options.
Some are designed to be good for nothing... JK I actually like Gladiator, but I won't be putting any precious resources into any version other than the 7 star.
The *how much* a champion ends up being is not generally an explicit target. Designers don't decide "this champ will be awesome" and "this champ will be subpar." Those things happen as a natural consequence of the design process: nothing hits the bullseye to begin with, and the degree to which players can leverage the abilities of a champion are a separate difficult to predict variable.
When you design a champ you only ultimately know what you can do with it. When other players test it, you know what they can do with it, after a couple days or weeks of thought. But you never know how a champ will work when released to a million other players. There are lots of champs that start off looking meh and then end up looking great after enough time elapses. And there are champs that look awesome but then after a while the players realize that what it does is not as important as they thought it would be. Into this fog of war, champion designs are released, and no one who claims to know right from the start where a champ will land is going to be right even most of the time.
They should, at this point, know what will be useful and to what degree since they're making the competing tools and the environment they'll be used in. They aren't making a new baseball shoe or something where they're absolutely surprised people are buying it for rock climbing. There shouldn't be many big surprises in how champs get used in the content they've made. Not since Quake at least. Let's say they have absolutely no idea, they couldn't look at Hercules and other high performers before him and figure it out?
Whether a champ is a summoner's choice or not has no bearing on any of this, and never will. There's never going to be another Herc, because there was never supposed to even be one of him. But that has nothing to do with him being summoner's choice. And before someone says it, I'll just say that anyone who thinks that players have every right to expect summoner's choice champs to be automatically much better than most other champs specifically because they are summoner's choice champs is just wrong, always will be wrong, and has to get over it because that's never going to change.
If you don't like Gladiator or believe he's underperforming, that's fine. That's for players to decide for every champ. But tying this to the summoner's choice process like that should matter is having the wrong expectations about what the summoner's choice process even is.
The base expectation for every champ is that they're good and have some feature that stands out, even if it is that they're solid everywhere. It's a bad move to make a big hooplah about putting a release to a vote and then make that release significantly worse than other offerings. If it was going to be nothing special, it doesn't make sense to make a big deal out of the process. You're looking to sow disappointment doing that.
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
This could all have been avoided if we selected Spider Punk
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
I find this response out of place. Although not the most eloquently written, OP’s claim wasn't that “If a champ isn’t as good as Hercules then it’s bad”. They claimed that Gladiator, as a summoner’s choice champion, should be reasonably expected to be a solid addition but fear of Hercules 2.0 caused you to be far too conservative in his design. No matter what you consider his peers: Be it 2023 champs or Summoners Choice Champs, Gladiator is probably the worst of the bunch which is disappointing to say the least.
Lumping that claim in with the “Herc or nothing” response misses the point altogether in my opinion and makes for a frail binary. It’s especially self defeating when Quicksilver, who is no Hercules, exists and has been well received (if not loved) by the community showcasing that a well put together kit paired with some solid relevance is all we ask for in the community champ. It may also be telling that the defense isn't that he is a solid champion/addition but rather spinning it back on the expectations of the community which may reveal Kabam’s own impressions of where Gladiator has landed
This was never a defence of Gladiator. I started my response by providing the context in which I was speaking: anecdotally, about the observations I made during the voting.
Hence why I find it out of place on this thread. I think we’re in agreement here that this point was tangential no?
It was tangential... which is why I prefaced it. Not sure why you think that would mean it doesn't belong.
Difference in style I suppose; personally I think I would want the leading response from the team to be the one which addresses the matter being asked but again, that may just be stylistic preference. I’ll just ask it again here then to try and get more toward the heart of the post: There is a concern that Gladiator fell flat in response to a measured approach to not accidentally making Hercules 2.0. Could you speak more to that concern and possibly about what a reasonable expectation going forward for where champions should land when we vote them in. An important quote from the hercules dev diaries was that champions aren’t “over or underperforming” prior to their release. When can we reasonably categorize champs into that underperforming category and is Gladiator in there?
The base expectation for every champ is that they're good and have some feature that stands out, even if it is that they're solid everywhere. It's a bad move to make a big hooplah about putting a release to a vote and then make that release significantly worse than other offerings. If it was going to be nothing special, it doesn't make sense to make a big deal out of the process. You're looking to sow disappointment doing that.
If you specifically go out of your way to make summoner's choice champs extra special, and aim high, then the same fog of war problems that affect every champion will occasionally make a summoner's choice champ into Hercules. Then you get to decide whether to nerf that champ hard after release, which will be much worse than just releasing a sub par champ, or allow another Hercules into the game and have to deal with the collateral damage that such a champ causes.
Is Quake even a 6* yet? If you aim for 5, sometimes you will get 9s. If you aim for 9, often you will get 11s. And when you do, there are consequences that last for a very long time.
And when you say "they should, at this point, know what will be useful and to what degree since they're making the competing tools and the environment they'll be used in" you say that like this is an easy thing to know, like hey, if the players can see this why can't the devs kind of thing. Except: the playerbase isn't really all that good at this either. The history of the game is littered with playerbase perceptions that end up being wildly far off the mark. Nor does the playerbase always agree.
For every champ there are adherents, both inside the dev studio and among the playerbase. There's no champ that no one likes. There are few champs that no one uses. We often judge champs by a specific unrealistic criteria: if we owned all of them, which ones would we use the most often. But that's not how 99% of the players of the game see roster choice. Most players have only a fraction of all the champs, and the question is not "which champ is the best" but rather "do I have a champ that would work?" Champs need to be useful, they do not need to be the best at something. There are over 200 champs, but there are not 200 different things to do.
Or to put it another way, the question is not "is there another champ that is better?" The question is "if I had this champ, how far could I go?" Because the players who have every champ are going to be difficult to please, but they aren't going to quit the game if the next released champ isn't meta-breaking. But the players who are still starting out, who are trying to climb the progress ladder, they are the ones most likely to quit if they get roadblocked because the champs they pull do not give them a good enough opportunity to progress quickly enough.
Gladiator is unlikely to be very high on most player's list of champs, but that's not as important as: does pulling him stunt player's progress? I don't think it does, if I had him on a new account I would likely play him and he would likely get the job done in a lot of stuff. And that's an important feature for champs to have.
Personally I wasn't expecting/didn't want a new Hercules like champ, Gladiator is not trash, just a mid champs. The problem are two: community expectation, he's far away from other OP cosmic champs (hercules, cgr, hulkling, galan, adam warlock), and the fact that he's in the titan, some people like me got him as 1st titan pull, probably I'd liked to be more excited than I was when I dropped him. I was kind "meh". I think that he could be way better just by adjusting his numbers.
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
Who was really honestly expecting Hercules 2.0? A perfect storm of a dozen or more individually advantageous design choices that in a smaller subset wouldn't be OP, just good? Who was seriously claiming that the SC champ must absolutely be absurdly OP no matter what, like the design team had no choice in the matter or was pushing "Vote Cosmic, no matter who it is", for such a dumb reason? That's just an easy straw man to throw out to invalidate any criticism or expressed disappointment, legitimate and rational or not.
Short answer: the people on social media and even here on the forums when they were making their arguments as to why Gladiator needed to win the vote.
Two of the most consistent answers given as to why Gladiator was the person they were voting for where as followed:
1. Cosmics were strong and consistent with gameplay: damage ratio. 2. The fact that many people knew who Gladiator was and since Herc and QS were both strong champs in the game, it created extra expectations for him to be a harder hitting version of Hyperion aka a "Herc 2.0."
So, combined with the repeated statements that people did not want "just another Mystic feline" after we had just gotten Tigra and that's how we got to this point.
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
I find this response out of place. Although not the most eloquently written, OP’s claim wasn't that “If a champ isn’t as good as Hercules then it’s bad”. They claimed that Gladiator, as a summoner’s choice champion, should be reasonably expected to be a solid addition but fear of Hercules 2.0 caused you to be far too conservative in his design. No matter what you consider his peers: Be it 2023 champs or Summoners Choice Champs, Gladiator is probably the worst of the bunch which is disappointing to say the least.
Lumping that claim in with the “Herc or nothing” response misses the point altogether in my opinion and makes for a frail binary. It’s especially self defeating when Quicksilver, who is no Hercules, exists and has been well received (if not loved) by the community showcasing that a well put together kit paired with some solid relevance is all we ask for in the community champ. It may also be telling that the defense isn't that he is a solid champion/addition but rather spinning it back on the expectations of the community which may reveal Kabam’s own impressions of where Gladiator has landed
This is why the balance program is in place.
OP is jumping the gun a bit. We haven't seen the data either. The community also has made mistakes before when determining whether a champion is viable or not. I know there are people that like him and don't like him.
Another thing to remember that there's a real person behind the creation of all the champs in the game. People like OP coming in guns blazing and just trashing the hard work that went into a specific character design. Maybe it didn't pan out, maybe it did. Most of the time, people can't even give ideas that could make a champ better or they pretend they know how these champs should be designed, but couldn't do it to save the life.
But we really just need to wait until they announce the data.
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
I find this response out of place. Although not the most eloquently written, OP’s claim wasn't that “If a champ isn’t as good as Hercules then it’s bad”. They claimed that Gladiator, as a summoner’s choice champion, should be reasonably expected to be a solid addition but fear of Hercules 2.0 caused you to be far too conservative in his design. No matter what you consider his peers: Be it 2023 champs or Summoners Choice Champs, Gladiator is probably the worst of the bunch which is disappointing to say the least.
Lumping that claim in with the “Herc or nothing” response misses the point altogether in my opinion and makes for a frail binary. It’s especially self defeating when Quicksilver, who is no Hercules, exists and has been well received (if not loved) by the community showcasing that a well put together kit paired with some solid relevance is all we ask for in the community champ. It may also be telling that the defense isn't that he is a solid champion/addition but rather spinning it back on the expectations of the community which may reveal Kabam’s own impressions of where Gladiator has landed
This is why the balance program is in place.
OP is jumping the gun a bit. We haven't seen the data either. The community also has made mistakes before when determining whether a champion is viable or not. I know there are people that like him and don't like him.
Another thing to remember that there's a real person behind the creation of all the champs in the game. People like OP coming in guns blazing and just trashing the hard work that went into a specific character design. Maybe it didn't pan out, maybe it did. Most of the time, people can't even give ideas that could make a champ better or they pretend they know how these champs should be designed, but couldn't do it to save the life.
But we really just need to wait until they announce the data.
I dont disagree with anything here. I think it would be nice to have something like “We are still teasing out good/bad gladiator is” would make for a much more direct response to the thread, and probably wouldn't inspire as much ire in the responses which seems to come from instead taking the discussion to a place about how we wanted another herc which didn’t feel like the issue at hand (that being, is gladiator unreasonably bad)
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
I find this response out of place. Although not the most eloquently written, OP’s claim wasn't that “If a champ isn’t as good as Hercules then it’s bad”. They claimed that Gladiator, as a summoner’s choice champion, should be reasonably expected to be a solid addition but fear of Hercules 2.0 caused you to be far too conservative in his design. No matter what you consider his peers: Be it 2023 champs or Summoners Choice Champs, Gladiator is probably the worst of the bunch which is disappointing to say the least.
Lumping that claim in with the “Herc or nothing” response misses the point altogether in my opinion and makes for a frail binary. It’s especially self defeating when Quicksilver, who is no Hercules, exists and has been well received (if not loved) by the community showcasing that a well put together kit paired with some solid relevance is all we ask for in the community champ. It may also be telling that the defense isn't that he is a solid champion/addition but rather spinning it back on the expectations of the community which may reveal Kabam’s own impressions of where Gladiator has landed
This is why the balance program is in place.
OP is jumping the gun a bit. We haven't seen the data either. The community also has made mistakes before when determining whether a champion is viable or not. I know there are people that like him and don't like him.
Another thing to remember that there's a real person behind the creation of all the champs in the game. People like OP coming in guns blazing and just trashing the hard work that went into a specific character design. Maybe it didn't pan out, maybe it did. Most of the time, people can't even give ideas that could make a champ better or they pretend they know how these champs should be designed, but couldn't do it to save the life.
But we really just need to wait until they announce the data.
I dont disagree with anything here. I think it would be nice to have something like “We are still teasing out good/bad gladiator is” would make for a much more direct response to the thread, and probably wouldn't inspire as much ire in the responses which seems to come from instead taking the discussion to a place about how we wanted another herc which didn’t feel like the issue at hand (that being, is gladiator unreasonably bad)
There's a 6 month testing period. We're halfway through their testing phase. We normally don't get anything half way through but we should all be aware they're gathering data during this time period.
No matter if they're afraid of making Herc 2.0 It's still really stupid how Summoner's choice went from Herc and QS who are beyond God or at worst God tier, to... THAT... * points at Gladiator * There's no excuse to downgrading the minimum goodness of Summoner's choice champions like that, u know the saying from zero to hero? Well i say... from hero to zero... thats how i can describe the Summoner's choice thing as a whole comparing the last 2 Summoner choices with the last one. I'm sure it's no coincidence that Herc and QS are both as good as they are, the Summoner's choice champions have to stand out, dosent matter if who wins is a literal Greek god or a mutant who uses bones as weapons (Marrow) that's also a big part of the excitement, knowing that whoever u vote for, whoever wins, will be a great addition to the contest... Gladiator wasn't nearly that, among all the champions in the game, he's definitely one of them... Hercules is super duper great champ in his class, QS is a superr champ in his class, Gladiator is a champ... I don't think anyone would care about these votes, were they to know that the winning champion will be fine at best...
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
Who was really honestly expecting Hercules 2.0? A perfect storm of a dozen or more individually advantageous design choices that in a smaller subset wouldn't be OP, just good? Who was seriously claiming that the SC champ must absolutely be absurdly OP no matter what, like the design team had no choice in the matter or was pushing "Vote Cosmic, no matter who it is", for such a dumb reason? That's just an easy straw man to throw out to invalidate any criticism or expressed disappointment, legitimate and rational or not.
Short answer: the people on social media and even here on the forums when they were making their arguments as to why Gladiator needed to win the vote.
Two of the most consistent answers given as to why Gladiator was the person they were voting for where as followed:
1. Cosmics were strong and consistent with gameplay: damage ratio. 2. The fact that many people knew who Gladiator was and since Herc and QS were both strong champs in the game, it created extra expectations for him to be a harder hitting version of Hyperion aka a "Herc 2.0."
So, combined with the repeated statements that people did not want "just another Mystic feline" after we had just gotten Tigra and that's how we got to this point.
The pro-Gladiator reasons I saw many more of here, on Twitter, and on YouTube BY FAR were: Gladiator is cool and I remember him dominating Juggernaut in the X-Men cartoon and: Gladiator is cool and I like the character from decades of comics wherein he dominated many heroes and villains, but also got his butt kicked by Invisible Woman. with a lot of Who? RE: White Tiger. I would cut people some slack for thinking that the yearly big Summoner's Choice champion with the hooplah and special voting and hype should be more than just some rando benchwarmer chump that doesn't do anything of interest beyond existing as arena fodder. I expect strong champ =/= I expect the 2nd coming of Hercules. If Kabam feels that some champs need to suck by comparison, then maybe they should save that for another month where they didn't build the hype up with an event.
I don't think anyone would care about these votes, were they to know that the winning champion will be fine at best...
I think most voters would continue to express an interest. The summoner's choice program is there to give players a sense of urgency about which Marvel characters enter the game, because there are literally thousands of them that haven't yet, and even if the game lasts a hundred years we still would barely have scratched the surface of the breadth of the Marvel Universe. And I would bet real money there are far more players like that than there are of players disappointed with the raw performance of their vote selections.
I don't think anyone would care about these votes, were they to know that the winning champion will be fine at best...
I think most voters would continue to express an interest. The summoner's choice program is there to give players a sense of urgency about which Marvel characters enter the game, because there are literally thousands of them that haven't yet, and even if the game lasts a hundred years we still would barely have scratched the surface of the breadth of the Marvel Universe. And I would bet real money there are far more players like that than there are of players disappointed with the raw performance of their vote selections.
I can only speak for me but my interest in the process will be significantly reduced if Gladiator’s balancing does not yield a big improvement.
I’m disappointed he didn’t come out swinging but I’ll let the rebalance process play out and see where we end up.
Observing the Summoner's Choice campaign was definitely an interesting process; I think it put on display a lot of community instincts.
We did say, repeatedly, do not vote for who you think would be most powerful, because inevitably the kits would vary and the team was very upfront with not making another Hercules.
We saw a lot of chatter along the lines of "vote for Gladiator because Cosmics are all broken" to which we, again, were very clear that would not be the case.
Now, whether or not he's the most/least powerful/useful champ of the year is for each of you to decide, but I think we need to do away with the thinking of "Summoner's Choice will be a completely OP champion" and "vote for Cosmics because they'll be Hercules 2.0." If you're noticing a trend of trying to build the game in a way that doesn't allow Hercules to roll through everything, it might also be a strange expectation to set for the next champion to match Hercules.
Who was really honestly expecting Hercules 2.0? A perfect storm of a dozen or more individually advantageous design choices that in a smaller subset wouldn't be OP, just good? Who was seriously claiming that the SC champ must absolutely be absurdly OP no matter what, like the design team had no choice in the matter or was pushing "Vote Cosmic, no matter who it is", for such a dumb reason? That's just an easy straw man to throw out to invalidate any criticism or expressed disappointment, legitimate and rational or not.
Short answer: the people on social media and even here on the forums when they were making their arguments as to why Gladiator needed to win the vote.
Two of the most consistent answers given as to why Gladiator was the person they were voting for where as followed:
1. Cosmics were strong and consistent with gameplay: damage ratio. 2. The fact that many people knew who Gladiator was and since Herc and QS were both strong champs in the game, it created extra expectations for him to be a harder hitting version of Hyperion aka a "Herc 2.0."
So, combined with the repeated statements that people did not want "just another Mystic feline" after we had just gotten Tigra and that's how we got to this point.
The pro-Gladiator reasons I saw many more of here, on Twitter, and on YouTube BY FAR were: Gladiator is cool and I remember him dominating Juggernaut in the X-Men cartoon and: Gladiator is cool and I like the character from decades of comics wherein he dominated many heroes and villains, but also got his butt kicked by Invisible Woman. with a lot of Who? RE: White Tiger. I would cut people some slack for thinking that the yearly big Summoner's Choice champion with the hooplah and special voting and hype should be more than just some rando benchwarmer chump that doesn't do anything of interest beyond existing as arena fodder. I expect strong champ =/= I expect the 2nd coming of Hercules. If Kabam feels that some champs need to suck by comparison, then maybe they should save that for another month where they didn't build the hype up with an event.
Not many people are going to understand the absolute facts you just spat in this forum thread. He didn't need to be Herc 2.0, we just thought he was cool and wanted him to be cool. The summoners choice champs should be ballparked around quicksilver and omega sentinel. Not absolutely busted like Herc, not dog poo like Gladiator but really upper good/solid champs like them. We voted for them after all, they should at least be that good
Alright, let's close this thread down. To be really clear here, Gladiator hasn't even had his Balance Pass yet, and while Community sentiment is something I make sure to take to those meetings, "he was voted for" is not something we will take into account.
We want players to love their Summoner's Choice Champion, but that does not mean they will get any special attention above those of any other Champion releases, who also have the same goal... have a place in the Game, and be fun for players to use. If Gladiator is not hitting those marks, we'll take them into consideration during his balancing pass.
Comments
The *how much* a champion ends up being is not generally an explicit target. Designers don't decide "this champ will be awesome" and "this champ will be subpar." Those things happen as a natural consequence of the design process: nothing hits the bullseye to begin with, and the degree to which players can leverage the abilities of a champion are a separate difficult to predict variable.
When you design a champ you only ultimately know what you can do with it. When other players test it, you know what they can do with it, after a couple days or weeks of thought. But you never know how a champ will work when released to a million other players. There are lots of champs that start off looking meh and then end up looking great after enough time elapses. And there are champs that look awesome but then after a while the players realize that what it does is not as important as they thought it would be. Into this fog of war, champion designs are released, and no one who claims to know right from the start where a champ will land is going to be right even most of the time.
Whether a champ is a summoner's choice or not has no bearing on any of this, and never will. There's never going to be another Herc, because there was never supposed to even be one of him. But that has nothing to do with him being summoner's choice. And before someone says it, I'll just say that anyone who thinks that players have every right to expect summoner's choice champs to be automatically much better than most other champs specifically because they are summoner's choice champs is just wrong, always will be wrong, and has to get over it because that's never going to change.
If you don't like Gladiator or believe he's underperforming, that's fine. That's for players to decide for every champ. But tying this to the summoner's choice process like that should matter is having the wrong expectations about what the summoner's choice process even is.
Lumping that claim in with the “Herc or nothing” response misses the point altogether in my opinion and makes for a frail binary. It’s especially self defeating when Quicksilver, who is no Hercules, exists and has been well received (if not loved) by the community showcasing that a well put together kit paired with some solid relevance is all we ask for in the community champ. It may also be telling that the defense isn't that he is a solid champion/addition but rather spinning it back on the expectations of the community which may reveal Kabam’s own impressions of where Gladiator has landed
I don’t need broken OP but I thought being a Summoners Choice champ had some additional clout. If it’s just us picking who comes first in group of 8 and they may be a dud and stay a dud that’s dissapointing.
Is Quake even a 6* yet? If you aim for 5, sometimes you will get 9s. If you aim for 9, often you will get 11s. And when you do, there are consequences that last for a very long time.
And when you say "they should, at this point, know what will be useful and to what degree since they're making the competing tools and the environment they'll be used in" you say that like this is an easy thing to know, like hey, if the players can see this why can't the devs kind of thing. Except: the playerbase isn't really all that good at this either. The history of the game is littered with playerbase perceptions that end up being wildly far off the mark. Nor does the playerbase always agree.
For every champ there are adherents, both inside the dev studio and among the playerbase. There's no champ that no one likes. There are few champs that no one uses. We often judge champs by a specific unrealistic criteria: if we owned all of them, which ones would we use the most often. But that's not how 99% of the players of the game see roster choice. Most players have only a fraction of all the champs, and the question is not "which champ is the best" but rather "do I have a champ that would work?" Champs need to be useful, they do not need to be the best at something. There are over 200 champs, but there are not 200 different things to do.
Or to put it another way, the question is not "is there another champ that is better?" The question is "if I had this champ, how far could I go?" Because the players who have every champ are going to be difficult to please, but they aren't going to quit the game if the next released champ isn't meta-breaking. But the players who are still starting out, who are trying to climb the progress ladder, they are the ones most likely to quit if they get roadblocked because the champs they pull do not give them a good enough opportunity to progress quickly enough.
Gladiator is unlikely to be very high on most player's list of champs, but that's not as important as: does pulling him stunt player's progress? I don't think it does, if I had him on a new account I would likely play him and he would likely get the job done in a lot of stuff. And that's an important feature for champs to have.
Have a nice day everyone
Two of the most consistent answers given as to why Gladiator was the person they were voting for where as followed:
1. Cosmics were strong and consistent with gameplay: damage ratio.
2. The fact that many people knew who Gladiator was and since Herc and QS were both strong champs in the game, it created extra expectations for him to be a harder hitting version of Hyperion aka a "Herc 2.0."
So, combined with the repeated statements that people did not want "just another Mystic feline" after we had just gotten Tigra and that's how we got to this point.
OP is jumping the gun a bit. We haven't seen the data either. The community also has made mistakes before when determining whether a champion is viable or not. I know there are people that like him and don't like him.
Another thing to remember that there's a real person behind the creation of all the champs in the game. People like OP coming in guns blazing and just trashing the hard work that went into a specific character design. Maybe it didn't pan out, maybe it did. Most of the time, people can't even give ideas that could make a champ better or they pretend they know how these champs should be designed, but couldn't do it to save the life.
But we really just need to wait until they announce the data.
It's still really stupid how Summoner's choice went from Herc and QS who are beyond God or at worst God tier, to... THAT... * points at Gladiator *
There's no excuse to downgrading the minimum goodness of Summoner's choice champions like that, u know the saying from zero to hero? Well i say... from hero to zero... thats how i can describe the Summoner's choice thing as a whole comparing the last 2 Summoner choices with the last one. I'm sure it's no coincidence that Herc and QS are both as good as they are, the Summoner's choice champions have to stand out, dosent matter if who wins is a literal Greek god or a mutant who uses bones as weapons (Marrow) that's also a big part of the excitement, knowing that whoever u vote for, whoever wins, will be a great addition to the contest... Gladiator wasn't nearly that, among all the champions in the game, he's definitely one of them... Hercules is super duper great champ in his class, QS is a superr champ in his class, Gladiator is a champ...
I don't think anyone would care about these votes, were they to know that the winning champion will be fine at best...
Gladiator is cool and I like the character from decades of comics wherein he dominated many heroes and villains, but also got his butt kicked by Invisible Woman.
with a lot of Who? RE: White Tiger.
I would cut people some slack for thinking that the yearly big Summoner's Choice champion with the hooplah and special voting and hype should be more than just some rando benchwarmer chump that doesn't do anything of interest beyond existing as arena fodder. I expect strong champ =/= I expect the 2nd coming of Hercules. If Kabam feels that some champs need to suck by comparison, then maybe they should save that for another month where they didn't build the hype up with an event.
I’m disappointed he didn’t come out swinging but I’ll let the rebalance process play out and see where we end up.
We want players to love their Summoner's Choice Champion, but that does not mean they will get any special attention above those of any other Champion releases, who also have the same goal... have a place in the Game, and be fun for players to use. If Gladiator is not hitting those marks, we'll take them into consideration during his balancing pass.