Ice, I want to say that I am grateful for the additions to the game and the increase in forum attendance. Thank you. But now the question.
I am not a developer and do not know the difficulty of creating and updating game content. I assume that there is alot more to it than the average layman knows. I have read countless posts from people that say that a majority of issues in the game would be solved if the characters already in the game were balanced, and other that say that the tweaking of a few numbers would not be difficult at all. With this being said, could you comment on why the characters that are often complained about (IM40, yelena, bagman, to name a few) have not been at least tweaked? Has there been any discussion on character balancing, and if so, what time frame are we looking at?
I know I am speaking for alot of people when I say that we want to use the established characters, if only they were a touch more appealing.
Thank you for your time, and once again thank you for a great game.
What’s your rationale for that statement? Unbalanced 2-star characters drive away new players and thus make no financial sense; thus, they do indeed try to balance 2-stars. Of course a few stronger 3-stars can become grind-targets which is good for cash, and weak 1-stars aren’t relevant because it’s so easy to get 1-star covers that anyone can easily get the stronger ones, but having a large viable cast of at least the 2-star characters is necessary so new players aren’t turned off by getting a bunch of weak new characters and being placed against swarms of strong new characters in PvP. And overall I feel 2-star characters are indeed pretty balanced, with only a couple being too weak (oh 2-star Cap, why does your red do nothing?).
Certainly adding new content is more exciting and attention-gathering than improving old content, I’m sure this contributes to your answer. Still, I’m very interested in the response - are there any plans to improve any of the older 3* characters that are distinctly sub-par? I like IM40, he’d be really cool if his red and blue were more viable - but as it stands I don’t see using him as anything other than a AP battery.
Part of the problem is one of subjectivity. Who decides if a character is balanced or is worthless or is overpowered?
Let me give some RL examples. Four of us in my family play MPQ and we all play differently.
2* Captain America - I never grooved to him. One of the few 2* that never got fully leveled and my earliest 2* sell. My daughter, Avari, has a maxed out 2* roster and Cap is her star player. She loves him and uses him all the time.
CMags - for me, he is one of my rotating roster. I regularly use him but he is one of many. My husband, Mystwalker, would leave me for CMags if he could. He loves him and plays him nearly every single match.
1* Hawkeye is one of two 1* characters I still have. I use him regularly in PVE. I, alone, in my family sing his praises. Everyone else never even had him long enough to level up.
I regularly read about characters that are worthless . . . . to the person posting. That doesn’t mean that the character needs tweaking. It just means that person doesn’t like it. Even if a lot of people on the forums chime in, it doesn’t mean anyting because we here are a small minority of players.
As the game developer, it becomes a lot less subjective since they have access to usage data. If only 1% of the player base uses Bagman, then he’s probably worthless. If 75% of all veteran players use Magneto, then he may be overpowered. The majority of characters will still be subjective, but there will be outliers that should be addressed.
And normally you can see the extremes in-game as a player. When Spiderman was OP, you saw him a lot. Bagman is worthless and you barely see him.
Everyone has a different play style, therefore prefer different characters. Especially players like myself. I love chess and when I play MPQ, I treat it as I would if I were playing chess. Example; I enjoy DareDevil and Bagman both. ( yes I meant to type “DareDevil and Bagman” ). I use DD to place a tile, then I use Bagman to move tiles of the same color around it to make a match 3 or 4 if possible.
Each peice/character has different moves. Some by themselves are weak unless used along side certian others. The chalenge is finding the combos that best fit your play style. If you do it right, then a pawn can not only Beat a Queen, but can become one.
As to the OP saying it only takes a few minutes to push a few buttons to make character changes. I am not a game programmer, so I have no idea how long the actual changes take. But I do know that after a change is made, but BEFORE it is released to the public, it must be tested. The hero that was changed has to be played with and against every other charater in the game at low, medium, mid-high, high, and max levels. And that takes a long time. Weeks to months even. ( at least that is how new changes are tested by a game maker I do security for every now again, I have no idea how D3 does it ).
Usage statistics and power are not necessarily linked though. Back during the thorverine days, IceIX said that Cap was a very solid 3rd place in usage numbers (in terms of 2*s, though that was probably overall, even with rags and spidey actually being useful), even with how terrible he is.
Usage statistics and power are totally linked. It’s just that there are also other factors such as ease of obtainment, which is one that in particular skews Cap’s numbers way up and always has.
This was back during the days before cstorm was nerfed too, so she had ridiculous synergy with thor (who still had a red which was even better than LT’s is now) and again, those were all 2*s
The Team Up powers are just magnifying the obvious problems.
These powers are like a fleet of cars. They spent a considerable amount of time programming all of these powers.
A lot of the cars were too nice and spiffy, so they upped the costs to unusable levels. They basically put 2 ton boat anchors on many of the cars.
Now, with Team Up powers out, we’re actually expected to use these cars. These spiffy, hard-to-program cars with boat anchors attached.
The blatantly obvious solution is to take off all the boat anchors. Much like it only took a few minutes to eliminate spam, it would only take a few minutes to take the boat anchors off the overpriced powers in the game by lowering the costs. If there’s a car that becomes too spiffy, then they can make more adjustments.
Balancing is programmatically easy to do. Lack of balance is ruining the game. Spending a lot of programming time for a power that is unusable is developmental insanity.
Those cars with boat anchors, they really mess up the road. And there is no reason for them.
Meanwhile, World Rupture and Supernova are way too speedy. A car that goes 400 MPH isn’t all that safe on the highway either, especially when Porsches-with-boat-anchors going 10MPH are all over the place.
Pretty sure you are massively overestimating what percentage of development manhours are in the raw coding. o_O That’s almost never the biggest time sink in a large-scale project.
I think the framework is pretty much done. Adding new powers shouldn’t be that hard if they’ve done a good job with the base framework. Their framework should make it easy for them to say, “Character A, Power 1, Level 1 = 1 strike tile, 5 cost” We’ve seen them have the ability to tweak powers without having to push out an update, so some of us would like to see them doing minor tweaks here and there. After a certain time period has passed, see if anything has gone crazy. For instance, instead of doing what they did to spiderman, they could’ve just added 1 to the cost of his blue power and then looked at the data after a few weeks. If they see that no change in usage has occurred, add another 1 to the base cost and collect data. Or lowering the cost for yelena’s black by 4 and seeing if anyone started using her more. Little tweaks here and there to help balance the game without going crazy. Instead, we see posts about how changes were playtested internally and was deemed “good to go” by the testers which resulted in 60+ page posts from the player base about how the changes were too extreme, making that character useless in most situations.
If they truly wanted roster diversity, they’d try to balance the characters little by little so that all characters are usable in more situations than they are now. Even though bagman is a joke, if they tweaked his numbers just a little bit, people would probably think more about the fights in which he’d be a very good support character instead of cannon fodder for tanking.
