Buff, don't nerf.

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

Look, let’s be frank. Power creep is going to happen. Don’t fight it, roll with it.

As developers, you’re probably worried about the state of your game, right? You want people to have to make a choice about who to take into battle. Now I’ll agree, when there’s no choice because two characters are always “the best”, then that’s a problem. So how do you fix it?

Well, you make other choices viable too. Iron fist is good, fast, and damaging. Luke Cage is solid too. Fury would be a top contender with just a little bit more “oomph” somewhere (just like he was in his buffed state last week).

Hey what’s that? Oh, right, you could make older characters better too! How awesome would a viable Beast be? Doc Ock? Remember the good times when XForce first got his buff?

Oh no! You don’t have any time to make old characters better, you say? Resources are stretched thin??

Well that’s funny, I could have sworn there was someone in the other room nerfing the Giant Mountain Cat out of 4* Thor. Now, it’s reasonable to take her down a notch, maybe, but this last bit has been WAY more than a notch. If someone put in the combination of time, effort, and money required to cover her, they’re making an investment in the game. You just de-valued the Mufasa out of the investments of your most loyal players. In a BIG way. Gee, let me find solace in the fact that I can sell her back for less than the cost of a single cover. Thanks for that…

If you kept releasing powerful new characters and continually buffing up the old ones, you could achieve a good balance. Remember how awesome it was when XForce got buffed? IT WAS AWESOME. Throw in some temporary rotating buffs at a level just a bit smaller than last round, and you could end up with a somewhat fluid meta going on.

Instead, we get nerfs that completely remove characters from people’s daily use, invalidating time and effort spent on the game.

Why nerf so hard when you can just buff?

2

Exactly!!!

3

Because you end up with a broken game.

You keep buffing until you have first turn kills. Now you have to buff everyone’s HP so that they don’t die in the first round. Now you have to buff everyone else’s abilities so that they do adequate damage with the new HP levels. And taht hodl until you next add some power creep and the whole thing begins again.

That’s what unchecked power creep means. You end up at the extreme end of the scale.

Look at the Magneto nerf. How do you buff everyone so the Magneto/Mystique endless turn combined with Prof X’s match 5 ability wasn’t broken? Is there a way to buff everyone else to fix that issue?

You have Thoress who is maybe a bit over the top with her charged tiles, and you want to add Gambit who also charges tiles. How do you buff everyone else to allow that kind of Synergy when one character is already over the top?

Hey what’s that? Oh, right, you could make older characters better too! How awesome would a viable Beast be? Doc Ock? Remember the good times when XForce first got his buff?

Yeah and then you get the ‘I sold my Doc Ock covers cause he was useless where’s my compensation?’ whining. Changing anything makes people unhappy. X-Force was great if you hadn’t been selling his covers for HP because he was so useless.

Oh no! You don’t have any time to make old characters better, you say? Resources are stretched thin??

Well that’s funny, I could have sworn there was someone in the other room nerfing the Giant Mountain Cat out of 4* Thor.

So you say they have resources to change old characters because they could change one thing that was actually affecting the game (Doc Ock is irrelevant to most players). And you say they got it incredibly wrong. A logical conclusion might be that they didn’t have the resources to get it right.

Now look at your idea of buffing EVERYONE constantly to stay ahead of power creep. Do you see any issue with your plan?

4

Why nerf so hard when you can just buff?

Because nerfing and buffing are tools used to get a desired state of play.
They are tools in the developer toolbox and ignoring one entirely isn’t the answer.

The forum player base were clear that wanted 4* characters to trample over 3* in terms of power. XF was to be viewed as The Punisher of his tier with plenty of future four stars being quite a bit strong and others being around the same or slightly weaker. That was the general forum consensus.

The devs took the opposite approach by choice. They nerfed just about everyone save XF and then told us in not so subtle terms that XF is on the chopping block so enjoy him while you can. Their choice to do this wasn’t to deliberately screw over the player base but to slow down the pace of the game. We’ve seen a TON of other changes to reflect this including the recent powered up PvP format and the reduction of boosts from 3 to 2.

The devs want a slower paced game where team composition has increased importance because they are expected to survive longer and dish out more in order to win.

Had they buffed all characters we’d continue to have a spastic skill spam game where matches are over or determined within 3 turns. Actually it would be worse because buffing so many characters would no doubt create even faster options to what was available.

After the dust settles with these changes and we get comfortable with the new game (say 3 months from now) I’ll be curious to see if people still want to return to the ultra quick pace of before. I personally had more fun with the game pre-nerf as well. But now that I see where the devs are taking this game I’m happy to go along with the ride and judge the end product when we get there.

5

As a quick pace player, I’m certainly being hamstrung by the reduction in boosts from 6 max colors down to 4. And so I’ll have to adapt my strategies accordingly. That said, I think your time frame is way too long. I wouldn’t be surprised if Will & Co. throws out more mid-season changes next season that changes the complexion of the game as a whole, something along the scale of a goddess nerf or a select pvp roster buff. The only way to handle these changes is to be flexible, a willingness to experiment and think outside the box, and most importantly, have a large roster to compensate for whoever gets kitty nerfed along with XFW. It’s the unexpected character nerfs that would burn players the most. icon_eek.gif

6

You nerf broken mechanics or re work them like in magneto’s case. In events where time is an important factor, match speed is essential in performing well. While nerfing may be essential to fix broken or interactions that were missed in play testing. Only nerfing makes the game drag on lowering performance. Buffing seems to be a better way to create balance when this game is so littered with under powered heroes. we want them to think twice before they bring the nerfs, only because they are horrible about using them. It would be fine if the nerfs were smaller and more spaced out so they could collect data for each one and gauge the community reaction to until they find the sweet spot. They cut 2 moves power in half,charge tile generation on SoP and smite damage output with no adjustment to ability cost and largely ignored the community feedback. do that same thing to any other hero and what do you get? nothing good. buffed elektra would be an excellent counter to thor and x force, and it throws in another possible pairing thats not xforce because their best move is both black shaking more things up. too many nerfs gets the community angry. too many buffs can make some angry but more happy. happy people spend more then angry.

7

First off all, NERFING and BUFFING are Fighting Game Terms. I cannot believe there is this craze now where everyone is repeating those words every five minutes, in a puzzle game. lol.

Anyways…

The Mags / Mysti was not a nerf, that was the fixing of a BROKEN mechanic. There’s a difference. Don’t get me wrong, they completely botched Mags for the vast majority of beginner - indeterminate players, but that’s a different topic.

But yeah, why is there any complaining about 1* < 2* < 3* < 4*. That’s how it SHOULD be.

8

I have to disagree with OP. Making abilities more powerful doesn’t improve the gameplay. Think for a minute about it. The more damage your power can deal the more the tactic leans toward ‘get the necessary AP for that, fire and oneshot win’. So the overpowered damage dealers trump and other abilities that seem nice on paper don’t stand a chance against them. Remove that disparity and many other abilities could shine and that would make gameplay richer.

Edit: My point is power creep is not necessarily good thing for the game experience. But OP is right on another point - some nerfs are so overreaching that they make characters nearly useless

9

Not to mention, as we saw in the recent “experiment,” when they buff, a heap of players are saying “but I invested in these characters because they were the most powerful, it’s not fair to make other characters as powerful as them” so it’s still a no-win situation

10

ya cause we were all complaining about the 4* that were boosted and destroying every team possible, oh wait, that didn’t happened it was the 3* boosted were way better then regular 4s and boosted 4 s combined. all a product of bad game balance. boosting just high lighted the issue.

11

You realize that when you buff one character, you inadvertently nerf all other characters in comparison right? When you nerf one character, you inadvertently buff all other characters. Therefore nerfs actually result in more buffs.

Also, the game is balance around certain core objectives. For example, they may say, “A fast battle should take five turns” If they have a character that can finish the game in two turns, that character breaks the game and forces all other characters to beat the battle in two turns. At that point, you’ve actually changed the entire game.

So a buff only mentality is a bad call. It doesn’t make sense in the overall makeup of the game, and is really only justified by players who only want to selfishly have power.

12

What does it matter? In high level play either 3* characters aren’t strong enough to be useful in which case buffing or nerfing them doesn’t matter, they all might as well be Beast, or they are strong enough to be useful which means they’re as good or better than 4*s. That isn’t “bad balance;” there’s no “balance” that’s going to change that.

13

Look, I’m not saying to never nerf anyone, ever. I’m saying to apply it as sparingly as possible and with an eye towards what the future of the game will look like. The experience of having one of your favorite characters nerfed hard is a poor one. Having other characters brought up to the same level isn’t a bad experience at all, it just gives you more fun characters to collect.

If the mechanic of something is inherently broken, then of course it needs to be fixed. When it comes to straight number tuning though, the devs seem pretty terrible at getting nerfs right (outside of Cmags, who turned out to be OK simply because Xforce got buffed). They take top-tier characters and make people just stop using them altogether. Next, characters of a more powerful level get released and the old nerfed ones never see play again.

Since the nerfs, I’ve barely had reason to use 4Thor. I’ve really only gotten to use her in Deadpool Dailies just to try her out. By wave 4 of the Big Enchilada I finally get to start using her abilities.

Fast forward another 6 months, and we’ll have somewhere between 12 and 20 new characters. If even half of them are Iron Fist/Luke Cage/Prof X/Kingping/Cyclops quality, then we’re not going to ever see 4Thor in a lineup again.

That’s terrible, considering that she used to be one of the best and people spent time, money, and effort on her with the expectation that she would continue to be a viable option for top tier play. She doesn’t have to be horribly OP and the clear choice for all situations, but when Iron Fist, Hood, and LThor are all looking more appealing than her in 9/10 situations, there’s a problem. Heck, if LThor had Call the Storm on blue instead of green, I don’t think it would even be a close contest for who to pair with XForce. He’d just be straight up better.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you have both a hammer and some candy, how about leaning towards giving out candy instead of bashing people?

14

What are you talking about? I just used 4or to grind the hardest nodes in first sub of Thick As Thieves as I am sure many other players in my bracket did, she’s still the most powerful character in the game, easily. Just not the fastest. shrug

15

This right here gives me hope for the future, because you just listed 4 of the last 5 Character Releases (minus Kamala Khan who should be on your list). So they are already 6 for 12 even if the next 6 characters are all terrible. If their misses become more rare, then we can hope for a bright future of powerful interesting balanced characters.

Also I can not wait for the PvP where Iron Fist/Luke Cage/Cyclops are all boosted.

16

ya but then your solution to balancing the game is to nerf everyone( sooooo many buffs to every other character right? ) to beast’s level and not fix anything. There are under powered heroes buff them. wait and collect data. rework, buff and then nerf if needed. you need to make sure a character playable in competition and is actually getting played. If a character is not getting played why is he not getting played? what is their role? is this a good role for them? who does it better and why? there is a lot that goes into balancing. At the top in a balanced game there should be soo many different combos that can come out on top. but if only one or two characters are at the top then the balance has fail and reworking the system is required

17

Hope for the future is great. No reason it can’t exist with the past, though. Making new good characters doesn’t mean they have to make the old ones bad.

I’ll have hope when they can balance a character correctly and make incremental changes when they goof. No reason that every nerf has to be a shotgun to the face when a dart to the neck would suffice.

18

So… instead of “Buff, dont nerf” they decided to go with… “some buffs, plus ultra-nerfs”… sigh.

It’s cool though, Beast’s green is better than Xforce’s as of 4/17. No big deal, there.

19

This is still a discussion worth having, I think.

20

Yea their character re-balances tend to be balance towards center, and not “adjust to within parameters”, so a balanced character loses a lot of what makes him good usually. The only instance where a nerf has come out the other side as half decent was Magneto (Both C.Mags and MNM).

I suppose they did do a small incremental change on Mystique but that one is still evidence IMO that they are using a reactionary approach and not forward thinking balance. She would have been fine at cost 9 for 1 less tile, instead they made it 1 less tile AND cost 10.

Power creep is bad, but gut punching your players by taking their favorite toys, in some instances purchased for quite a sum, is worse I think. I wish they would have just lived with the XF they had and made other 4*s equally as strong instead of pushing him down the ladder from his perch on the top.