A Question For Ice about Character Balancing

[Spoit]

@I am Zero

@EternalLurker

@Nonce Equitaur 2

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.

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.

That’s antithetical to their design philosophy. IIRC, they said somewhere that there is always a backlash against nerfs of any kind, so rather than trying to zero in on a balanced point, it’s better to take one big move, because “that too will pass” (and then they forget to ever balance it back up)

[system]

Bumptatsic

[Spoit]

@Paintsville

Bumptatsic

Seriously?

[system]

@Spoit

@Paintsville

Bumptatsic

Seriously?

Bumping your own thread twice while adding 0 information. Shit needs locked.

[system]

Wow. OK, sorry for trying to show the devs that this wasn’t a "this to shall pass, let me bitch and moan for a second thread. I was just trying to get a question answered, one that has been ignored for far to long. Won’t happen again.

[yogi]

The devs know we all talk a lot about this and probably do sometimes scan over what we write and might take it into account, as a sort of side / back up to their metrics. There have been dozens of general and specific threads about such topics, the vast majority of which go unanswered, so don’t feel too disheartened.

They do balance characters, they just… have their own schedule. Sometimes announced, sometimes unannounced, sometimes reannounced, sometimes more than one of these, etc etc.